Transcript

Robyn Williams: This week, another badass. I think that's an ordinary cuss who won't worry about the rules but cuts through to get results. It may mean you kill yourself, but if not it's a hero status. Here, our own Bel Smith from the ABC Science unit is speaking at Scienceworks in Melbourne. And she talks about some of her favourites.

Bel Smith: My favourite scientists are the ones who do a lot of testing on themselves. So Barry Marshall drank some bacteria and gave himself some stomach ulcers. Henry Head (?) was a neuroscientist and he snipped some nerves in his arm and just waited to see how long it took for them to grow back. But I think you'll agree with me that the baddest badass of them all was Colonel John Paul Stapp. John Paul Stapp was born in Brazil in 1910, named after his dad's favourite apostles. He was sent to Texas to go to high school. He eventually went to med school. He graduated from med school in 1944 and the tail end of World War II. Now, World War II was a war primarily fought in the skies, so John Paul Stapp went and joined the air force. But instead of going to fight, he went in to research. His first assignment was to find out how to stop pilots from getting the bends. You might be more familiar with the bends, to do with diving right, so you've got a diver going from an area of really high pressure to an area of low pressure. So a diver descending really quickly means that the nitrogen that's normally dissolved in their blood will bubble out. And that causes all sorts of medical havoc.

Pilots have the same kind of thing. If they go straight up in the air from an area of relatively high pressure at sea level, zoom straight up into the stratosphere where it's very low pressure, they also get the bends, but unlike divers they don't have the luxury of going up there slowly. The whole idea is to fang up there fast. So Stapp decided to see what the effects of high altitude flying were by doing it himself. So he spent 65 hours flying through the stratosphere, and eventually found that if you breath pure oxygen before zooming up you don't get the bends. And pilots today use the same technique to stop those nitrogen bubbles. He was given another assignment in 1946. This was examining the effects of rapid human deceleration, or plane crashes. In WWII, more planes were destroyed than there are on Earth today. And with them, pilots died. A common thought back then was that the human body could only withstand a certain number of Gs, or G-forces – and that was 18 Gs. Now, a G force is a measure of acceleration relative to gravity, and so just standing up here on the stage, at sea level, I'm feeling just one G through my legs. You can experience Gs from any angle though, so if you're accelerating in a car you might feel pressed back into the seat. That's a bit of the G force, right there. Astronauts on the space shuttle might experience 3 Gs? An F-1 car braking really hard might get up to six Gs. And with 18 Gs thought to be the human limit, cockpits were designed to withstand a 16 G force crash. Stapp thought that that might not be the case. He noticed pilots walked away from very high magnitude crashes, which should have exerted way more than 18 Gs, while other pilots died in much lower magnitude crashes. He wanted to find out why. So in 1947 he went out to the desert, outside LA, where there was a big sled track designed to test missiles. On the sled track was a special sled, and it was called the Gee Whiz. It was a fully enclosed sled about the same size as a Toyota Hilux, give or take. Now the Gee Whiz weighed about 700 kilograms and on the back you could strap on four booster rockets. These boosters were designed to lift really heavy aircraft off really short runways, and each booster exerted around two tons of force. The Gee Whiz, you might have figured out by now, was not designed for missiles but for people. It was designed to hold one passenger, seated backwards, and that passenger was supposed to be a dummy called Oscar 8-Ball. But when Stapp arrived and he saw the dummy, he allegedly went over, patted the dummy on the head, and said – 'We're not going to need you – I'll be the test subject.'

At one end of the track you've got your sled with its rockets, at the other end of the track were hydraulic brakes. And these brakes were capable of stopping the sled from going hundreds of kilometres an hour to a dead stop in just a few seconds. By controlling how hard or soft those brakes were, you could control how many G forces the passenger experienced.

Of course, before Stapp got in the sled he had to test it out and this is where Oscar 8-Ball stepped up to the plate. A few test runs with Oscar, in one, Oscar was harnessed in with a fairly standard seat-belt. All four rockets blazing, 320 kilometres an hour. The sled hits the brakes and the brakes lock up. Oscar experiences 30 Gs. His face fell off, and his body blasted through the inch-thick wooden windshield and landed 200 metres away.

A couple of weeks after that, Stapp decides it's his turn. He didn't go the full four rockets – that would be insane, right? He just had one to start. And boom! Off he went. He hit 145 kilometres an hour, and he was okay, he was fine. The second run he did on that very same day, he went to three rockets. Just skipped the second one. This time he reached 320 kilometres an hour. It's pretty fast, he hit the brakes, and he was fine again. He actually did 16 runs on the Gee Whiz – he smashed past 18 Gs, he once got up to 34 Gs. Doing this is not without its issues. He had cracked ribs, concussion, he lost some fillings, he broke his collarbone and dinged his wrist a couple of times.

A couple of months later, Stapp's higher-ups wanted to know what the hell was going on down there. So he submitted a report with all his own sled runs, he had the dummy runs in there as well, he also used a couple of chimpanzees and a couple of other human people. But for the best part it was just him. So the top brass read the first couple of pages and were like – Dude… Stapp was like, it's alright guys! Chill the freak out. Just keep reading, alright? So they did and they were like – 'Wow, people can actually withstand more than 18Gs. Let's raise the cockpit standards of military aircraft so when they do crash, they can withstand crashes of a much higher magnitude.

Following the Gee Whiz, Stapp decided to go for something a little more extreme, as if a rocket-powered sled wasn't extreme enough. He wanted to look at ejector seats. Specifically, what would happen if a pilot ejected from a plane going faster than the speed of sound?

This required a much longer sled track, a faster sled. So he went out to the New Mexico desert where there was a one-kilometre track being built. And he and his engineers built a new sled called the Sonic Wind. It was a little bit bigger than the Gee Whiz, but it wasn't enclosed. It was essentially a bunch of pipes welded together and with a removeable windshield … and space for 12 rockets on the back.

So in 1953, March 19, he went on his maiden run. Six rockets. He reached 680 kilometres an hour in five seconds. When he hit the brakes he was still going at five hundred kilometres an hour. Even better, there seemed to be no lasting effects. Fantastic! So he kept pushing the envelope. And on December 1953, on his 29th ride, and his final ride, he decided to go nine rockets. No windshield either. He was protected by a suit, a helmet and a visor. He bit on a rubber wedge so he didn't obliterate his teeth. It had an accelerometer in it too. And then it was blastoff time.

10 metre streams of fire out the back! He hit 90 per cent the speed of sound. Faster than a bullet. When he hit the brakes he was doing 1017 kilometres an hour and came to a dead stop in 1.4 seconds.

To think about that in real terms, imagine the forces you'd feel if you crashed your Lamborghini at 200 kilometres an hour into a brick wall. Imagine feeling that maximum force for nine times longer, that's approaching what Stapp felt. He reached a maximum of 46.2 Gs. He spent 1.1 seconds at 25 Gs, which is unbelievable. He stopped at the end of the track, not moving, just a single man on a sled on a pile of welded pipes in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Colleagues and ambulance, they all rushed to the scene and unstrapped his helmet and he's just slumped there and it looks awful. But he's okay! He's alive! You thought he was dead. But he wasn't.

He's loving it. He actually manages a smile, which if you look at photos actually looks more like a grimace, but whatever, it's a smile. He's completely redded out, so every single capillary in his eyes burst. And as he fanged along at a thousand kilometres an hour, tiny little specks of dust that were hanging in the dry desert air punched through his suit and bruised and spattered on his body underneath, he just had big red rashy marks under there.

So when he was picked up and put on the stretcher he couldn't see. No real surprise there. They thought maybe his retinas had detached, but within a couple of hours he could see shapes, and by the next day his vision was pretty much back to normal.

With that last ride, Stapp set a land speed record – he was the fastest man alive at the time. With that came all the media attention, but the first thing he did was get married. He always said he wasn't going to leave his wife married to a smear of gore on the desert floor.

He wasn't a massive media tart either, he didn't really want to be in the public eye, but during all these high-speed tests he realised the air force was using as many people to automobile accidents as they were to plane crashes. And of course, back then, cars didn't have all the safety features that we enjoy today. So he spent the next decade or so lobbying for seatbelts, shock-absorbing dashes and steering wheels, and in 1966 when LBJ signed in to law that all new cars had to be fitted with seatbelts, Stapp was by his side.

Obviously he won a buttload of awards, he authored loads of articles, he was president of a bazillion rocket organisations and societies, and he retired as a colonel in 1970. He died in his sleep at home in New Mexico at the age of 89, at zero Gs.

Robyn Williams: Well, that was Bel Smith from the ABC Science Unit, and you can see her reports most weeks by going to the science ABC website. Next week, Solange Cunin tells why she's fascinated by the promise of space research in Australia. I'm Robyn Williams.